Inside the toxic court of Charles: How the Prince dropped friends over disagreements, brutally dismissed loyal staff and even made digs at The Queen

In our exclusive serialisation of a brilliant new biography of Prince Charles, yesterday we examined his encounters with a glamorous Chilean researcher — and a Camilla lookalike who ran his Highgrove gift shop.

Here, in the third extract, SALLY BEDELL SMITH exposes the Prince’s petulance when he is crossed — and the poisonous atmosphere among his courtiers . . .

One of the less attractive facets of the driven, mercurial heir to the throne — as I discovered from spending four years interviewing 300 of his friends, officials, family members and acquaintances — is that he doesn’t like being challenged or forced to give ground.

According to many who know him, rather than engage in debate, he will shut it down — or even simply leave the room.

To this day, Prince Charles remains resistant to ideas that contradict his intuition, even when he is presented with compelling new research.

Consequently, he has always sought out people — both on his staff and in his collection of outside advisers — who agree with him.

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Prince Charles, pictured with Camilla on a visit to Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, is 'petulant' when crossed by his friends, according to a new biography

Not that this always shields him from aggravation. I also found he used to lose his temper with staff and had alienated some of his most senior officials.

During a weekend at Sandringham in the late Eighties, the respected art historian John Richardson tried to persuade the Prince there was not a ‘chasm’ between classical architecture and the contemporary buildings Charles so vehemently detested.

‘Oh, Richardson, I have to see to the dogs,’ the Prince replied, and walked out of the room.

Richardson recalled: ‘He didn’t want to discuss it. He doesn’t want to be questioned or be bothered. You can’t budge him.’

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On another occasion, Charles found himself in conversation at a small dinner party with a writer known for his incisive analysis and wide-ranging intellect. The subject they discussed was free trade.

‘Have you ever been to Lagos?’ asked the Prince. ‘It is simply frightful. People are living in the most appalling conditions, and it is because of free trade.’

‘Sir, it is because of a lack of free trade,’ the man said. Without waiting for him to explain, Charles said shortly: ‘I disagree with you.’ At which point, the hostess kicked the writer under the table and he wisely shut up.

‘The Prince’s attitude was not “let’s have an argument,” ’ the writer recalled. ‘He was genuinely annoyed within three remarks.’

In this respect, Charles is quite unlike his parents. Philip, who is as strong-minded as his son, welcomes robust argument and is prepared to engage with anyone who intelligently articulates a different point of view.

The Prince of Wales, pictured in Italy, can be 'pig-headed' and will 'drop friends who contradict him', according to sources close to him

And the Queen listens patiently to contrary opinions. To some degree, her approach reflects her aversion to confrontation, but she has a genuinely open mind.

Deeply insecure and often unhappy as a child, Charles has sought ever since to make his mark by diving headfirst into controversial issues — such as climate change and GM foods — without properly thinking them through.

In a letter written in March 1987, he admitted: ‘Unless I rush about doing things and trying to help furiously, I will not (and the monarchy will not) be seen to be relevant and I will be considered a mere playboy!’

He is no intellectual: his ironclad positions on a range of issues are largely based on his intuition — and with each passing year, his faith in these original instincts has only deepened.

‘He hasn’t changed really much at all,’ said a man who has known him for decades. ‘There is exactly the same uncertainty and lack of confidence. But he affects confidence a lot.

‘He can be pig-headed. He knows he needs to be more confident, and will stick to something, come hell or high water.’

His speeches — on everything from the environment to homeopathy — have not always been well-received.

Tellingly, Charles has had the four words ‘Be Patient and Endure’ framed and put up on his dressing-room wall.

His staff have had cause to take these words to heart. As his projects began proliferating in the Eighties, it became clear Charles had no idea how to exercise authority as a chief executive.

Charles is also said to have seldom seen grandson Prince George, pictured with Prince Harry, early on in his life and 'missed his first and second birthdays'

The difference between the Queen’s efficient and well-oiled operation and her son’s was ‘like two railways on different gauges’, said Sir Malcolm Ross, who has worked in both palaces.

Caught up in his enthusiasms, Charles picked up the phone at all hours, indifferent to time zones or the personal circumstances of the person at the other end.

Even his friend Robert Kime, the interior designer, describes the Prince as a lighthouse with a constantly shifting beam that would stop and shine on someone for a concentrated burst of activity before moving on.

David Airlie, the Queen’s close friend and long-time senior adviser, considers him ‘a very emotive person. He gets very worked up about things. He can be very difficult to handle’.

Sometimes, Charles would stay up all night to work on something that engaged his interest; otherwise, his concentration would wander. Unanswered letters piled up and important documents went unread.

Equally worrying was the verdict of his deputy private secretary Mark Bolland, who worked for Charles for five years until 2002.

The Prince’s court, he said, was like a ‘very medieval environment [full of] jealousies and intrigues and backstabbing and plots’.

One senior courtier with reason to feel bitter is Richard Aylard, who was private secretary at the time when the Prince admitted his adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles in Richard Dimbleby’s biography and TV documentary.

There was uproar at the time, and many wondered why Charles hadn’t ducked the question.

Several months later, Aylard was at a dinner party with the Prince when Natalia Grosvenor, the wife of the 6th Duke of Westminster, asked Charles why he’d confessed.

‘He pointed across the table at his private secretary and angrily said: “He made me do it!” ’ recalled another dinner guest. ‘It was a very unattractive moment. He is not loyal to the people who work for him.’

Another revealing glimpse into Charles’s rather chaotic household was offered by the Queen’s former Comptroller, Sir Malcolm Ross.

In 2006, at the age of 61, he’d agreed to work for Charles as his Master of the Household.

Talking to me seven years later, Ross remained so scorched by the experience that, as he put it, he was willing to drop his guard ‘as the polished courtier’ to ‘let the truth come out’.

HE MISSED GEORGE'S PARTY TO VISIT SQUIRREL SANCTUARY

After the birth of Prince George, Charles said that becoming a grandfather had given him a ‘sharper focus’ on the problems of the world.

But in his grandson’s first year, the Prince seldom saw him — in sharp contrast to Kate’s parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, who frequently visited Kensington Palace.

When George celebrated his first birthday — at a party attended by the Queen, all the Middletons and assorted godparents and royal relatives — Charles was touring a red squirrel sanctuary in Scotland.

At one point, Tiggy Legge-Bourke — who had helped look after his own sons — actually phoned him to talk about his apparent lack of involvement.

She bluntly advised him to take a break at the end of the day, when he was making his usual phone calls, and instead ‘come round for George’s bath time. Otherwise you won’t know your grandchild’.

Despite her efforts, Charles doggedly kept to his schedule and embedded routines.

He did see George at Sandringham and Highgrove, but he managed to miss his grandson’s second birthday party, too.

On day one of his new job, he had discovered he’d gone ‘from something incredibly disciplined to something that had no rules’.

Working for Charles was a ‘shock to the system’, Ross recalled.

‘I had three calls from the Queen outside working hours in 18 years. I had six to eight of them from the Prince of Wales on my first weekend.’

He noted that Charles’s strength — ‘he never, ever stops thinking, he never stops pursuing ideas, he wants to get a move on’ — led to exhaustion and fits of temper.

These minor tantrums weren’t malicious, Ross said — they usually involved demands to know why his orders weren’t being carried out on the spot.

‘I was called names I hadn’t heard since my early days in the Army,’ added Ross. He also sensed a pervasive fear among the other employees.

Assistant private secretaries lingered in the office, afraid of being dressed down by the Prince if they left at a normal hour.

Ross was particularly taken aback when he found that Charles’s private secretary, Michael Peat — who had worked for the Queen — seemed to have turned on the monarch, denigrating Buckingham Palace advisers as ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘old has-beens’.

The new Master of the Household couldn’t restrain himself: he announced that he’d leave the room if such discourtesy continued. But it did, in several more meetings, and each time he walked out.

Ross concluded that ‘this was Prince Charles’s view, and Michael Peat was a clone of Charles. If the Prince said: “Oh God, what is Mummy up to?” Michael Peat would adopt the same view in his own language.’

It wasn’t long before Ross sensed information was being withheld from him. He saw no camaraderie among the staff, and began to hate his job.

Was Charles responsible for his household’s unpleasant undercurrents?

‘He is not a fool,’ said Ross. ‘He was more than aware of what was going on.’

Despite the tensions, Ross acquitted himself well in the Prince’s service. But after less than two years, he was fired.

The pretext was that Ross had done some consultancy work for a security firm — while on his annual leave.

‘I was delighted,’ he said. ‘I had had it . . . I couldn’t adapt, and I tried. I did everything I could.’

The Prince of Wales, he added, was ‘a tremendous guy in many ways, but he has a bad side, too’.’

Others would agree. David Checketts served from 1967 to 1978 and helped Charles launch The Prince’s Trust.

But as private secretary, he repeatedly found himself on the receiving end of his boss’s irritability — usually when engagements on his schedule bored or irked him.

He’d call a charity golf tournament ‘idiotic’, for instance, and then refuse to present a trophy.

His changing moods kept his private secretary off balance, and the end, when it came, was humiliating. The Prince simply offered Checkett’s job to someone else, without telling him.

Charles, pictured with Camilla, is 'oblivious to how he is perceived' and has a 'weakness for the company of the super rich'

So the private secretary left, feeling understandably embittered. ‘It was messy, not deft,’ said a courtier who witnessed how Charles got rid of him.

One of Charles’s problems is that the cocoon of privilege which surrounds him seems to make him oblivious to how he is perceived.

Thanks to the Duchy of Cornwall, he has far more millions in spending money than the Queen.

Even the 2008 financial crisis failed to dent his fortunes: his shrewd advisers managed to pull his funds out of the stock market before the crash.

His wealth has given him a stupendous level of luxury. By 2003, he had a retinue of 91, including 17 on his personal staff.

A year later, the number of personal staff serving Charles, Camilla, William and Harry was 28.

The Prince also has a weakness for the perks — and the company of — the super-rich.

Over the years, he has taken full advantage of offers of yachts, flights on private jets and sumptuous estates for private holidays.

Indeed, he can become querulous if the level of luxury isn’t to his satisfaction.

In 1997, after being forced to fly club class rather than first class on a chartered British Airways 747 flight to China, he wrote self-pityingly in his journal: ‘It puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable.’

He was doubly irked to learn that several politicians were in first class, including Robin Cook, Edward Heath and Douglas Hurd. ‘Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.’

Ten years later, Charles was in first class as he flew back to the UK after receiving an award in Manhattan for his apocalyptic pronouncements on the environment.

BITTER FALLOUT OVER CAMILLA'S SON, THE 'BAD INFLUENCE'

One of Charles’s closest friends was Hugh van Cutsem, a Life Guards cavalry officer whom he met while an undergraduate at Cambridge.

Hugh and his wife Emilie were to become crucial figures in the lives of William and Harry when the Prince’s marriage was falling apart.

They also provided safe houses for Charles to meet his mistress, Camilla.

But the friendship between the two households later came spectacularly to grief.

During the Diana years, the young Princes often went to Norfolk to stay with the van Cutsems, who had four boys. Emilie, who was a stickler for manners, became a kind of surrogate mother.

Born to an aristocratic Dutch family, she had a certain hauteur, not to mention a strong streak of snobbery.

She forbade William from coming to dinner in jeans and once — when out shooting — gave ‘Willsie’ strict instructions to address her husband as ‘Mr van Cutsem’.

The Prince of Wales, left, is also said to have fallen out with close friend Hugh van Cutsem, pictured right in 1986, over Camilla's son Tom who was accused of being a 'bad influence' on William and Harry

A friend who witnessed that moment approved of her strictness, which he felt was a corrective to Diana’s indulgence and encouragement of over-familiarity.

‘And to be fair to Emilie, she provided the boys with a warm home life,’ he said.

The first cooling of the van Cutsem friendship with Charles came in 2000, after Camilla’s son Tom Parker Bowles was caught taking cocaine. He promised his parents he would never take drugs again.

But over dinner one night, Emilie voiced her concern to Prince Charles that Tom was still using cocaine.

She was worried, she said, that he might be a bad influence on William and Harry.

When Charles reported this to Camilla, she was livid. The Dutch woman’s high-handedness had started to annoy her and she felt Emilie could sometimes be too proprietary about the Prince and his sons.

Charles’s long-standing friendship with Hugh van Cutsem cooled.

Then four years later, Charles and Camilla were invited to what was being billed as the wedding of the year — between Edward van Cutsem, one of Charles’s godsons, and Lady Tamara Grosvenor, daughter of the Duke of Westminster.

William and Harry were asked to be ushers.

In keeping with conventions of etiquette and hierarchy, the front pew of Chester Cathedral was designated for the Royal Family.

Days before the ceremony, however, Camilla learned she’d been banished towards the back of the congregation on the bride’s side of the church — supposedly to avoid offending the Queen, who was also a guest.

Camilla was so mortified by Emilie’s decree — which included instructions for her to arrive and leave separately from Charles — she announced she couldn’t possibly attend.

Torn between loyalty to his mistress and his old friend, Charles sided with his lover. So neither attended the wedding — a humiliating affront to the groom and his parents.

Despite the van Cutsems’ painful estrangement from Charles and Camilla, William and Harry maintained their friendship with the sons.

Indeed, one of Prince George’s godparents is William van Cutsem, the youngest of the four brothers.

In 2013, just seven weeks before Prince George’s christening in October, Hugh van Cutsem died of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 72.

But before his death he and Charles had been reconciled. The Prince had heard about his illness the previous April and rushed to see him in Norfolk — his first visit in a decade. Charles left in tears.

That September, he attended the funeral with Camilla, William and Harry.

Later, he moaned in a letter to a friend about the ‘incredibly uncomfortable’ first-class seats and how he yearned for the luxury of a Gulfstream jet, owned by one of his charity donors.

Despite his sterling work for the young and underprivileged, Charles’s extraordinarily cossetted lifestyle can create blind spots.

He saw no contradiction, for instance, in spending £5.6 million in public funds on refurbishing Clarence House for his own use, plus £2million of his money on redecoration.

And then running a plastic hose out of his bathroom window — ‘I empty my bathtub with a hand pump to water the plants,’ he told his architect friend Andrés Duany.

Without a trace of self-awareness, in 2003 he praised a shanty-town in Bombay as a primitive form of community that could teach the West about sustainability and interdependence.

Charles, pictured in Italy with Camilla, may not be as 'agreeable' with prime ministers as his mother has been

It never occurred to him it might be condescending to glorify a squalid, malodorous and unhealthy community whose residents were mired in poverty.

Or that the Dharavi slum, which had a population of a million and just one bathroom per 1,500 residents, was half the size of his Highgrove estate.

Fourteen years have passed since then and Charles’s rhetoric has recently become more muted.

The government boxes he used to set to one side while he tended to his copious correspondence and speech-writing are now thoroughly examined.

He will never be like the Queen, who has spent a lifetime concealing her thoughts, even her mundane likes and dislikes.

But as he edges closer to the throne, the signs are he may yet buckle down to his constitutional role.

‘I’d imagine the audiences with Prime Ministers will run longer,’ said one of Charles’s former advisers.

‘He won’t be as agreeable with them as his mother has been — their sessions with the Queen were therapeutic.